NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
The Holy See needed allies. In 1936, as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany expanded their reach, the situation for Catholics across Europe grew increasingly perilous. On its own, the Vatican realized it could do little to protect those Catholics. It needed partners.
That need led Archbishop Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli to board a ship bound for the United States in October 1936. Ostensibly, the then-secretary of state for the Vatican (and future Pope Pius XII) came to America for vacation. But his real objective was to secure the appointment of a U.S. diplomatic representative to the Holy See, a post that lingering anti-Catholicism had kept vacant since 1867.
Fortunately for Pacelli, President Franklin D. Roosevelt needed something from Rome as well. A Catholic priest in Michigan, Father Charles Coughlin, was using his popular radio show to attack Roosevelt’s politics. With Roosevelt’s first bid for reelection upon him, the president feared Coughlin’s potential effect on Catholic voters. A visit from Pacelli and the appearance of friendly relations between the White House and Rome seemed like just the thing to neutralize the Michigan priest.
With both sides prepared to deal, Pacelli arrived in New York on October 8, 1936. He spent a week on the East Coast, and then he boarded a plane that took him to nearly a dozen cities across the Midwest. His fast-paced, city-hopping tour led the American press to dub him “The Flying Cardinal.”
As Pacelli traveled, stories and rumors about his visit—the first ever for such a high-ranking Vatican official—filled the press. Chief among them was that he had come to silence Coughlin. No record exists of what, if anything, transpired between Pacelli and Coughlin during the visit. But on November 4, Roosevelt won his reelection and Coughlin fell silent.
The following day, Pacelli traveled to Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, New York. He congratulated the president on his victory and secured his promise of a U.S. envoy to the Holy See. Pacelli sailed for Rome 24 hours later, his “vacation” successfully complete.
